Vicky Allan
Explorers are not the worst exploiters of our planet
LAST week, my son happened to be watching a YouTube video on the “top 10 places no human has ever set foot on earth”. The premise of this was that we might think everywhere on the planet has been done, but there are still some bits left, and here’s a list of them. It happened that, topping this, at number one, was North Sentinel Island, a place the narrator warns is the “one I would most strongly advise against visiting”, as if he were giving it a bad review on TripAdvisor.
Later in the week brought us a reminder of why one might heed this warning. Reports emerged that an American, John Allen Chau – variously described as a “tourist”, an “adventurer” or a “missionary” – who decided to visit the island, despite the laws prohibiting it, had been apparently killed by the islanders. Of course, it’s not true that “no human” has ever set foot there – a community has long been living there. The Sentinelese are a protected people. They are also people that, as the narrator of the film even acknowledges, “reject, sometimes violently, any kind of contact with the outside world”. Two fishermen, he notes, who drifted there in 2006, were killed.
Also included in this remote “top 10” were Vale Do Javari, the Star mountains of Papua New Guinea and Greenland. It could easily have been a list of “best beaches” of the type I’ve written myself. That’s the problem with such lists. Sometimes they make things that are not consumable seem so. They make it seem like the Earth is only there for our exploration and delectation, as a tick-box on our bucket list. At the end the narrator asked the viewer: “Do you have a burning desire to visit any of these places? ... Will you ever set foot on North Sentinel island?”
“Best leave those places alone,”
I said to my son and went on to explain the story of John Allen Chau. I wasn’t so much warning him not to go to dangerous places as arguing that the age of exploration, of being the first to go where no white man has been, is done, or at least should be. It’s good there are bits of the planet that are untouched – arguably there should be more. Just as we worry about our use of the planet’s resources, we might also want to question the way we see its wild places as a resource for our personal journeys.
Explorers, of course, are not the worst exploiters of our planet – so I don’t want to be too bah humbug about exploration. I also want all children, including my son, to explore. But what? And where?
Chau’s story reminded me of the story of Benedict Allen, the explorer who went missing in Papua New Guinea last year. Following his reappearance, Allen defended his travels, saying his work wasn’t about “leaving your mark” but about “opening yourself up and allowing the place to leave its mark on you”. True, but isn’t that what all our life journeys are – the world leaving its mark on us, us leaving our marks on the world, whether we mean to or not?
It seems to me we need to reinvent exploration – to create a new low-impact version that can be owned by all of us, not just white men and those others with the privilege to join the club. We need to remake it for these times of rising global temperatures and growing human population. Some of the people I admire most are those who explore their back drying greens as if they had landed on the moon.
Pioneering Edinburgh University chemist Professor Polly Arnold once told me her mother said to her when she was a child that she should be an explorer when she grew up. “I didn’t realise that meant scientist,” this explorer of molecules observed. “Neither did she.”
It’s time for us all to realise – we don’t have to travel far to go where none have been before.